Group items tagged

BEIJING, Feb 9 (IPS) - When China's human rights record comes up for review before a key United Nations panel on Monday, this nominally communist country will have two contrasting accounts of its human rights situation.

Forest struggles and movements in India were a part of the rich tradition of anti-colonial struggle. In North Bengal, the recorded history of forest movements dates back to the 1960s and the movements themselves have been continuous ever since. However, despite the sincere efforts of those movements the livelihood opportunities of the forest dwellers worsened daily. The 1972 Wildlife Act together with the 1980 Forest Conservation Act strengthened further the oppressive structure of the forest bureaucracy. After the introduction of the Joint Forest Management Programme in the 1990s backed by the 1988 Forest Policy in India, it was expected that the forest dwellers would become more empowered economically and socially in lieu of their participation in the forest protection activities. But this failed miserably in the region and in 2000, against such a backdrop, a movement was started to demand land and livelihood rights for the forest dwellers. Following the Notification of the Forest Rights Act (2006) the movement has gained a new momentum while continuing its struggle against the biased implementation of the Act. This article presents a brief account of the movement in order to assess its significance and changing focuses over the years

For decades, China has maintained State import monopoly in cultural products. The opaque State trading operations ensure a maximum level of flexibility and efficacy in the government censorship of imports. The WTO judiciary held in the China-Publications case that this practice is inconsistent with China's trading rights commitments under its Accession Protocol and cannot be justified by the public morals exception of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. To comply with the WTO ruling, China must restructure its censorship regime, which it apparently is not prepared to do. This article analyses the implications of the WTO decision and provides a critical assessment of the new WTO jurisprudence regarding trading rights and the China Accession Protocol.

The fight for women's rights came about hand in hand with the struggle for democracy, civil rights and national liberation in different countries and periods, says Ines Alberdi, executive director of UNIFEM

Although the minister did not clarify what those reservations will be, it could be surmised that they involve certain rights in the political sphere that the Cuban government has denied to political opposition groups on the argument that they are at the s

BANGALORE, May 8 (IPS) - Even while India goes to the polls in a lumbering show of democracy, human rights activist-doctor Binayak Sen remains in prison on unproven terrorism charges.

In the face of police brutality, crackdowns on political parties and media, and a host of other violations ahead of Egypt's Nov. 28 parliamentary election, human rights advocates are calling on President Barack Obama to use U.S. leverage to persuade Egypt

This article argues that contending ideas about autonomy lie behind current discourses of human rights, claims to nation-state and cultural autonomy, and democracy promotion. Globalizing processes are bringing these contested understandings of autonomy, a

Sultana Kamal dreams of a country "where every single citizen will live in democracy, in equality" and where everyone has "equal share to resources and opportunities." Fulfilling this dream has been her lifelong advocacy as a human rights advocate.

for a Western audience unfamiliar with al-Jabri's work and the trend which he both represents and has been instrumental in developing, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought is not only a suitable introduction, it should be required reading.

Human rights and global democracy are widely assumed to be compatible, but the conceptual and practical connection between them has received little attention. As a result, the relationship is under-theorized, and important potential conflicts between them

Global governance in an era of human rights is beset by a number of unavoidable paradoxes. One is that as more states are increasingly held accountable for fulfilling legal obligations towards citizens, the same states are also obliged to collude in econo

That human rights should be viewed as a complementary aim to the international pursuit of collective security was an intention of the drafters of the Charter and the subsequent Universal Declaration and they were correct to stress that functional relation

WASHINGTON, Apr 7 (IPS) - Human rights groups welcomed the conviction of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison Tuesday on charges of murder and kidnapping.

El Salvador is characterized by the sad record of having one of the highest degrees of violence and crime in Latin America. Recent governments have tried to fight it with programmes called 'mano dura' or 'super-mano dura' with measures and practices that have often violated human rights and judicial guarantees. This paper aims to explore the Supreme Court's role in the application of these policies by the Salvadoran government. We discovered that the highest court in this country supports this kind of policies termed by some analysts 'policies of punitive populism'. In this sense, the Constitutional Chamber acted in contrast to what is required by democratic theory. The paper proceeds as follows: in the first part we analyse the theoretical framework of public safety policies and frame the Salvadoran case. In the second part, we explore the Supreme Court cases that support (or not) these policies, examining the performance of the court in relation to these cases. The last part is a summary of our evidence.

Strong civil society provides individuals with arenas to bring their interests to the attention of policymakers. In so doing, civil society organizations (CSOs) can support state policies, but can also criticize policies. This paper argues that most minority rights advocacy CSOs in the Baltic states have little say in the crafting of policy and are compartmentalized into the existing agendas, with only a few groups able to evaluate policies independently. It concludes that the Baltic civil society is weak because the CSOs working on minority issues ask policymakers either too much, or too little. The findings suggest that policymakers quell criticism of their work from the side of the CSOs by ignoring their activities. Alternatively, by funding the CSO that shores up the state agenda, policymakers delegate their responsibilities to civic actors, keep critical voices from public debates and claim that their policies have the full support of a vibrant civil society. This paper investigates the options available for civil society actors to relate to policymakers in a nationalizing state by drawing on the data collected in 77 semi-structured interviews with the CSOs working with Russian and Polish minorities in the Baltic states between 2006 and 2009.

Activists use emotional language and images - what Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter coined 'mindbombs' - to convince people that some actions are wrong, morally and environmentally. For instance, for over 50 years anti-sealing activists have employed mindbombs to transform seal pups into babies and seal hunters into barbarians. Although 'image politics' contributed to the decline of the Canadian sealing industry in the 1980s, its effectiveness has been - and continues to be - rocky, particularly as pro-sealing voices counter with competing claims of cultural rights, traditional livelihoods and sustainable use. Drawing on Tilly and Tarrow's 'cycles of contention' framework, this article argues that controlling and predicting the global uptake of messaging is becoming harder as activists operate in an increasingly crowded discursive landscape, as campaigners and counter-campaigners articulate scientific and moral frames that resonate differently across changing social and cultural contexts, and in light of globalising markets, transnational networks and changing media.

"Recently, theorists have sought to justify transnational democracy by means of the all-affected principle, which claims that people have a right to participate in political decision-making that affects them. I argue that this principle is neither logically valid nor feasible as a way of determining the boundaries of democratic communities. First, specifying what it means to be affected is itself a highly political issue, since it must rest on some disputable theory of interests; and the principle does not solve the problem of how to legitimately constitute the demos, since such acts, too, are decisions which affect people. Furthermore, applying the principle comes at too high a cost: either political boundaries must be redrawn for each issue at stake or we must ensure that democratic politics only has consequences within an enclosed community and that it affects its members equally. Secondly, I discuss three possible replacements for the all-affected principle: (a) applying the all-affected principle to second-order rules, not to decisions; (b) drawing boundaries so as to maximise everyone's autonomy; (c) including everyone who is subject to the law. I conclude by exploring whether (c) would support transnational democracy to the extent that a global legal order is emerging."

The social contract in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia has concerned not classical political rights but socio-economic issues. Loyalty is accorded to the powers-that-be partly from fear of repression, but also in return for new opportunities of advancement-whether resulting from social upheaval or from educational expansion-and for modest improvements in living standards. The Soviet era ended when such benefits could no longer be delivered, on account of lower oil prices, arms-race burdens and lagging productivity and innovation. After the turmoil of the 1990s, the contract was re-established under Putin in the early 2000s. Public opinion accepts relatively authoritarian rule if economic stability appears guaranteed in return. Moreover, world events from 2008 onwards have dampened economic expectations. Nonetheless, the sustainability of the present contract is doubtful, with economic modernization likely to prove elusive in the absence of effective democratic institutions.

"'Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call 'cadastral fixes' to rural underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the word 'information' to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. 'Information' is productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform, the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information, towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land."